Sasha Gibbs

I am Sasha, Sasha Gibbs. I am currently in London, but kind of go travel all around the country with work. And I'm a nutritionist for Holroyd Howe.

So my job is very varied. I spend a lot of time going into schools, doing presentations to pupils of all ages from kind of two, three years old, all the way up to 18, teaching them about how to build healthy habits, have a healthy relationship with food, how to boost energy. We do more female specific sessions sometimes.

So that's part of the job going in with the educational side. We do pop-ups at lunchtimes, so going in, getting tasting tables to try and convince pupils to try different foods and discover different foods. So that will typically be a day in a school.

And then I can also do educational sessions with teachers, with our staff or with parents as well. So we're quite varied in the education side.

And then stepping away from that when I do more like when I'm working from home on days, we tend to go through menus of the schools, check that they're nutritionally balanced, how they're doing based on our guidelines. So we try and make sure that you're getting everything you need from all your meals in school.

So if I'm in a school, I'll get there for kind of 8.30. Could be anywhere in the country. I travel around a lot.

Often doing an assembly at first. So 15, 20 minute presentation either to kind of all the prep school age children or senior school children, depending on which school I'm at or what year groups I'm doing.

And then often have lots of smaller workshops throughout the day, kind of half an hour, 45 minutes engaging with the pupils, to try and make it as interactive as possible and age appropriate.

So we tend to have a few sessions in the morning, have a lunchtime pop-up maybe, and then a couple of sessions in the afternoon as well, depending on how the school decides to schedule it really. So that tends to be about four days of my week.

So our kind of team is quite varied. So I work very closely with the other nutritionist, the head of nutrition at Holroyd Howe. And then I also work a lot with the chefs that we've got in the business.

So the chef trainer, and then also regional chefs that we all come into a school together and do a pop-up together, maybe promoting either increasing fibre or they would do a chef demo and I'll kind of talk through the nutritional benefits.

So that's chef side, but also when it comes to day to day, I will go and meet all the teams on site. Although I'm not working with them day in, day out, I'll work with them that day. And there's a lot of communication that goes on between us throughout the week or two weeks before in order to get everything we need for the tasting tables or the different sessions.

So I work with those teams quite heavily as well, as well as doing the menu checking for them.

The best thing, the most fulfilling part is definitely kind of doing the workshops in the morning and then you come to lunch and they are ready and trying to, especially with the practical, trying to show off what you've taught them and they're trying to impress you.

So they're telling you about all the new foods that they're trying that they didn't necessarily like before. And just seeing that people are trying to really increase the diversity of their diet is very sweet to see.

The hardest part, I would say you can, there's a lot of time on your own when I'm travelling between schools.

I'm doing a lot of driving, a lot of miles done most days. So I think that would probably be the downside that you lose, kind of that you don't see the same people every day.

I think I've taken quite an interesting path here. So I did... I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I ended up doing a sport and exercise science degree at the University of Bath. And then even from then, I wasn't really sure, but I knew I was interested in nutrition.

And in lockdown, I did a kind of mini course in nutrition. And then I decided to go down that route and do a sports nutrition masters in 2021.

Off the back of that, kind of decided I was really interested in the content, but not necessarily the kind of teaching side of it, because a lot of I feel like particularly in elite sport, right at the top of your game, there's a lot of kind of teaching people, but also selling what you're saying. So it becomes kind of sales verse and teaching together in order to get them on your side and, and convince that you do know what we're talking about.

And I wasn't sure that that was entirely for me. So left it for a couple of years and then actually thought, no, I do want to be in the nutrition industry.

So I spent last year actually working with a mountain bike team. So I travelled around the World Cup circuit with an under 23 mountain bike team, which was a really, really exciting year. We got to go to some really cool places and really bond as a team, which was lovely.

But with the movement, there's a lot of lack of stability, there's you don't really know where you're going to be necessarily when you're going out.

There's no wiggle room in terms of where you're going to be at certain times if you're needed, you're needed for that whole week, you can't really take the time off, that race is going to happen regardless. And if you don't take that opportunity you could lose that straight away. So it's quite, it's quite competitive.

So with that, I was looking for something a bit more stable, a bit more routine. So found this job here as a nutritionist for Holroyd Howe, where I have variety every day going into different schools, meeting a lot of different people, but actually still working the kind of Monday to Friday, usually, life which I found I was craving at that point.

That's interesting because I guess through school, you've gone through schools. So I can kind of see where the students are now and where the pupils are and kind of what timeline and kind of compare myself to how I compare them to how I was at the time.

So it gives you a bit of a better idea of how to target different age groups and what messaging to kind of feed to different age groups.

For example, I've learned that going at it from a sports nutrition perspective, even if you're just going down the general healthy habits, healthy relationship with food avenue, it's quite a good way to get them interested and it means that they can use that information in real time rather than kind of not really necessarily seeing the benefit.

So I think it's allowed me to make it more age appropriate in my role.

I think so far it was probably being in Brazil with the mountain bike team last year. There were seven of us out there and it was just a really, really fun time. We got some really great results.

It was challenging. I was cooking for the riders with a rice cooker and a hot plate in a hotel room. So it was definitely challenging at times, but it was really fun and we had a really great time out there. So I definitely won't forget that.

I think hard work can look different in different areas.

If you think about kind of studying, you're always thinking the person who's working from eight o'clock in the morning till like six pm all day every day revising for exams particularly, you think of them as being hard workers, but actually not everyone is suited to that kind of way of working.

So actually being able to kind of work to your strengths and revise and learn in the way that works for you, and not everyone being the same, I think, is really important to learn.